Will 2012 be the year Oregon finally adopts a reasonable marijuana policy?

Oregonians love marijuana. Take a walk along Southeast Clinton Street some summer evening and you’ll get contact confirmation.

The
most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, from 2009, estimated
that between 7.7 and 11.3 percent of adult Oregonians had blazed in the
previous 30 days. That’s the seventh-highest rate in the nation, behind
a bunch of states like Alaska and New Hampshire whose citizens are
essentially snowed into their grow houses half the year.

We
harvest it by the bale, too. Oregon’s marijuana crop was valued at more
than $210 million in a 2006 paper by activist Jon Gettman. That makes it
the state’s fourth-largest cash crop behind hay, wheat and onions.

And yet, for a state
that prides itself on its progressivism, Oregon lags behind California
and Colorado, where medical marijuana patients are free to shop at
for-profit dispensaries. Here, as in Washington, Montana and New Mexico,
patients must grow their own or persuade another cardholder to grow it
for them without state oversight. That’s hardly a reasonable way to
dispense “medicine.”

Will 2012 be the year we finally make progress? Here’s a primer to the state of weed in the state.

Hey, man, what’s up with Oregon’s 420 laws?

Well, it’s still illegal. Possession of more than an ounce
is still a class B felony, and possession of less than an ounce is
punishable by a fine of up to $1,000. The Portland Police Bureau
investigated about 860 marijuana-related cases in 2011, according to
bureau spokesman Sgt. Greg Stewart.

Bummer, dude! Are we gonna, like, fix that?

Possibly by the end of 2012. There are
three organizations gathering voter signatures to place legalization
measures on the ballot in 2012. The Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, headed
by activist Paul Stanford, is pushing the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act.
Oregon NORML is behind Sensible Oregon, a legalization measure similar
to NORML-backed initiatives in California and Colorado. Oregon Marijuana
Policy Initiative director Robert Wolfe has written a constitutional
amendment legalizing the personal use, possession and production of
marijuana by adults.

Whoa, there are three different legalization plans? That’s weird. Are they super different?

The initiatives vary mainly in complexity.

The first plan, the
Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, is five pages of legislation allowing
Oregonians over the age of 21 to grow and use marijuana without a
license and establishing an Oregon Cannabis Commission, similar to the
Oregon Liquor Control Commission, to govern the licensing and taxation
of commercial cultivation and sale.

OCTA is the latest
version of the project to which Stanford has dedicated his career. “This
initiative, I started drafting it in 1988, and I’ve had input from over
100 experts and lawyers around the world,” he says. The biggest change
to the new OCTA, according to Stanford, is the separation of the OCC
from the OLCC—since a 2011 poll indicated “people don’t want to see
people buying alcohol and marijuana at the same time.”

The second plan,
Sensible Oregon’s measure, takes a less proscriptive approach. Instead,
it just repeals the Oregon statutes banning the manufacture, delivery
and possession of marijuana and replaces them with language that
prohibits the restriction of those activities by adults over the age of
21. It also directs the Oregon Health Authority to come up with rules
governing the legal sale of marijuana by the beginning of 2014.

“Sensible
Oregon is a statutory initiative that would remove all civil and
criminal penalties for the possession, the transportation, the
cultivation and the use of marijuana for adults, and it allows [you] to
cultivate in your yard as long as you give it away,” says Oregon NORML
director Mary Anne Sanford. “We’re leaving everything else intact.”

The
third plan, OMPI’s measure, is the simplest of the bunch. It’s only
three sentences enshrining the right of adults to grow, possess and use
marijuana in the state constitution.

“There’s two ways to
go with these things,” says Wolfe of legalization. “You can write 10 to
30 pages and impose on Oregon a fully conceived new marijuana economy,
or you can ask a simpler question that’s relevant to a lot more people,
which is, should we suffer fairly harsh criminal penalties for
possessing marijuana and maybe growing a couple plants yourself?”

Cool beans, man. So will any of them make it to the voting round?

It’s too early to say—petitioners have until July 6 to
turn in enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot (116,283
signatures to amend the constitution, 87,213 to change state law). OCTA
has gathered more signatures to date than its competitors (about 30,000,
according to Stanford), but the campaign has already spent over
$97,000. It’s now broke.

“We
had a benefit that wasn’t beneficial in July,” Stanford says. “I’ve
donated about $80,000 [from the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation], which
amounts to about 80 percent, maybe 95 percent, of the funds raised so
far. I’m ready to contribute another $5,000.”

OMPI’s campaign has
fewer signatures but more cash, thanks in large part to $45,500 in
donations from the Foundation for Constitutional Protection, a group
based in Austin, Texas, that funds marijuana legalization efforts.

“I don’t think OCTA
or the Sensible Oregon measure has any chance at all,” Wolfe says.
“[Sensible Oregon] doesn’t have any resources. OCTA [has been] stalled
out for months. We, on the other hand, are just now developing, and we
have the funding in place to push forward.”

As
of press time, Sensible Oregon’s ballot title had not been approved by
the state. The campaign has recorded donations of $534.

“They’re all trying
to get to the same end,” NORML’s Sanford says of the measures. “One’s
really long, one’s absolutely one sentence, and ours is just trying to
get to provide it to people.”

If any of the
initiatives succeeds in making the 2012 ballot, Oregon will not be alone
in voting on legalization. The backers of Initiative 502, a Washington
state measure similar to OCTA, say they’ve turned in over 100,000 more
signatures than they need to qualify for the ballot, and the Regulate
Marijuana Like Alcohol Act of 2012, a legalize-and-tax initiative in
Colorado, claims to have submitted sufficient signatures to qualify as
well.

Whoa, déjà vu! Haven’t we voted on this before?

Speak for yourself, gramps. Marijuana
legalization last made the ballot in 1986, when supporters of the Oregon
Marijuana Initiative spent about $50,000 only to see the measure fail
with just 26 percent support. Previous versions of Stanford’s Oregon
Cannabis Tax Act have failed to make it to the ballot in 1996, 1998 and
2010.

So what will this mean for all my friends with little cards for their backaches and nausea?

The many dispensaries, co-ops, delivery
services and other assorted businesses that have sprung up to serve the
57,389 patients enrolled in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program
continue to exist in a regulatory vacuum.

Two
Washington County dispensaries, Wake n Bake and Serene Dreams, were shut
down by police in 2011. At least one Portland dispensary, Foster
Healing Center, closed its doors voluntarily after then-U.S. Attorney
Dwight Holton issued a warning in June that “the sale of marijuana for
any purpose—including as medicine—violates both federal and Oregon law
and will not be tolerated.”

Holton’s
warning didn’t stop OMMP cardholders from opening dispensaries and
delivery services in disused storefronts across the city. Potlocator.com
lists 21 dispensaries in Portland, each of them operating within their
own interpretation of Oregon law.

Can’t trust the Man, man.

Indeed.
In the absence of clarified rules from the state, Don Morse, director
of Human Collective, a Tigard “OMMP membership support group,” is
seeking to bring some order to his industry through the creation of a
trade group, the Oregon Greener Business Bureau.

Created in December
at the first-ever OMMP Business Conference in Clackamas, the OGGB
requires its five members to abide by strict rules: They must document
all transactions, test all dispensed marijuana for pesticides, use
medicine vials with childproof caps, and not dispense more than an ounce
per week to any one patient, and will not business names or carry
merchandise that “reflects recreational use.”

“Because there are no
legislative rules or guidelines for this industry, we have created our
own,” Morse says. “Believe me, there are plenty of resource centers and
dispensaries that are not applying this level of common sense.”

Morse
says the organization is seeking to hire a lobbyist, and hopes to get
some of its self-regulations enshrined in law in 2013.